class design improvement - user validation

Question

I'm looking to improve this class - any suggestions? It checks for empty, name, email, and password. The regex for email is very simple. A very lengthy article from the Linux Journal for improving upon this is here. The character set for password I borrowed from the NASA signup page. For name I allow letters, periods, and dashes. Testing for empty was developed with in this SO Post

class check 
 {
 static function empty_user($a)
 {
 return (int)!in_array('',$a,TRUE); 
 }
 static function name($a) 
 {
 return preg_match('/^[a-zA-Z-\.]{1,40}$/',$a);
 }
 static function email($a)
 {
 return preg_match('/^[a-zA-Z0-9._s-]+@[a-zA-Z0-9.-]+\.[a-zA-Z]{1,4}$/',$a);
 }
 static function pass($a)
 {
 return preg_match('/^[a-zA-Z0-9!@#$%^&*]{6,20}$/',$a);
 }
 }

• Maxpm: You really shouldn't use a regex to validate email addresses. Also, why is this in a class? A namespace would make more sense.
• user7212: For email validation/sanitization look at the built in (PHP 5.2+) filter functions. php.net/manual/en/filter.examples.sanitization.php
• Chris Aaker: is it possible to see the regex they use for the filters?
• user7212: @Chris Aaker Good question. This link answers that stackoverflow.com/questions/5682106/…
• palacsint: Please don't edit the question to make the existing answers meaningless. If you have new versions of the code post a new question. Reference this one (in it's original form) and explain that it's a new issue. meta.stackexchange.com/questions/94446/… meta.stackexchange.com/questions/64459/…

Answer 1

First of all, as mentioned by @user7212, use php filter_var() for email validation. Please see below for example:

/**
 * Validate email
 *
 * @param string $email
 *
 * @return bool
 */
public static function email($email)
{
 return filter_var($email, FILTER_VALIDATE_EMAIL);
}

Second, why not naming your function params? If the email validation function would be called $email, if would be much easier to understand then $a.

in_array() function, according to it's documentation, returns bool. Why converting it to int? The result of the check should be bool.

In the pass() function, are you checking a string or a hash? Which brings us to the following item - write comments for your code! PHPDoc is a good example on how to do that.

And the last, but not the least - the name of the class. Check is not the most appropriate name. I would consider Validation or Valid.

Hope this helps.

• t1gor: Please tick the answer if it helped ;)